Standard Operating Procedures for Conducting Field Experiments Under AICRP on Floriculture

Abstract

Floriculture is becoming important for domestic and export markets and the demand is ever increasing. Opportunities for floriculture and landscape gardening are increasing due to urbanization and enhanced expendable income. In the fast changing global context, managing the change on a time scale, by converting weakness into opportunities to become internationally competitive is considered important. The increasing demand for both cut flowers and potted plants in Western countries will result in the production gain from our country. The scope expands further by increasing the production of exiting product as well as expanding the product range. There has been an appreciable increase in floriculture, but potentialities, which exit in the sector, have not been harnessed. The sector has lot of potential to address social and economic issues including employment generation, private sector investment, entrepreneurship, job for unemployed educated youths and women empowerment. The All India Coordinated Research Project on Floriculture was started during IV-Five Year Plan (in the year 1970-71) to initiate scientific research on floriculture. Initially there were 5 centres which were reorganized from time to time and at present the coordinated project has 21 Centres which includes 15 budgetary, 4 Institutional and 2 Voluntary, covering 17 states of India. Since its inception, the AICRP has made substantial progress in development of new and improved varieties of flower crops, standardization of production technology including improved plant protection measures and post harvest management. The mandate of AICRPs is not only the testing of verities and agrotechniques but also identification of location specific problems and their solutions. When experiments are conducted at many locations and many personnel are involved, it is necessary that common methodology is followed so that the results can be compared across locations. Proper care has also to be taken in recording observations so that we can understand the crop phenology vis a vis the environment. There, is a need to delineate a uniform set of essential observations that have to be recorded in all the experiments which would help express the phenology of the crop affected by the environment or treatments. Moreover, such a systematic list of observations would help to adopt a systematic analysis protocol. Further, the personnel conducting the trials at different centers are of widely different background, hence, well described protocols for conduct of the trials as well as recording observations would reduce the human errors in recording of observations. Hence, a need was often felt to develop a technical manual on standard operating procedures that will give clear cut guidelines for the personnel involved in conduct of field experiments and recording the observations. An effort is therefore made to bring about this publication entitled Standard Operational Procedures for Conducting Field Experiments under AICRP on Floriculture.